Regardless of the role, from therapists to receptionists to cleaners and specialist technicians, all your spa employees needs to foot the company ethos and be able to represent you and the company well for the business to succeed.
For this to occur, you need to establish what traits and essential skills you seek in a person, and then find a blueprint of the qualities you may wish for them to excuse.
There is a ton of advice on how to evaluate soft skills at each stage of the hiring process.
But, let’s take a step back for a moment, from the ‘how’ to the ‘what’: out of the dozens of soft skills and personality traits in existence, which exactly are the qualities of a good spa employee and candidate you should always look for?
Knowing these important qualities to look for in an employee means you have better chances of hiring the best people and avoiding the terrifying costs of making a bad hire that can escalate quickly before your very eyes as the feeling of inevitability hits you in the pit of your stomach.
So with that in mind, we narrowed down the list to five critical spa job candidate qualities you should be looking for when hiring. They are:
- Working As a Team
- Enthusiasm to Develop
- Communication
- Drive and Desire
- Shared Vision
These are of course just some of the characteristics and skills that your ideal candidate will possess.
The qualities listed should be evaluated alongside other core values such as empathy, compassion, conscientiousness, creativity, and integrity.
But these are traits you should evaluate no matter the spa role you’re hiring for. Here’s exactly why that is, in more detail:
1. Working As a Team
Most jobs require a degree of collaboration with other people and sometimes managing others, as well. Even work that’s often seen as lonely, such as accounting or software development, may involve considerable input from other people.
So unless you’re specifically hiring for a lone worker, you need people who are able to collaborate well with others.
Knowing the value of teamwork can help spa employees make a strong case to management on various policy issues, from learning and development to workplace culture. So here are the key reasons teamwork is so important in the workplace.
Teammates Learn From Each Other
Imagine you have a workforce of 10 masseurs, all working in separate rooms. Each designer works to their own strengths and suffers from their own weaknesses, with nobody to teach or learn from.
Now put them all in the same room, on the same project. Working together, they’ll soon learn each other’s strengths and correct each other’s mistakes. And everyone’s performance will improve.
Teamwork Can Create Healthy Competition
But what happens to that same team of 10 therapists a year down the line, when they’ve learned all they can from each other?
They’ll soon start to compete with one another, to prove their ability and chase promotion or other incentives within your organization.
Provided the right challenge and rewards are in place to promote competition, team performance can keep improving.
Vantage Circle has tips on how to promote healthy competition in the workplace.
Teamwork Promotes Strong Working Relationships
Finally, when spa employees work together and succeed as a team, they form bonds that can turn into trust and friendship. It’s human nature. And it’s great for your spa since employees who like and trust each other are more likely to:
- Communicate well with each other
- Support and motivate each other
- Work cooperatively
It’s little wonder successful organizations value teamwork so highly.
2. Enthusiasm To Develop
Life-long learning is a must nowadays. An abundance of new technology and knowledge gets thrust out all the time, and organizations and systems alter to fit the new criteria.
Whoever doesn’t learn risks staying behind, no matter their accumulated knowledge or position.
A willingness, and ultimately, an ability to learn are very important qualities of a good employee, not just for learning new hard skills, but also for growing as a professional and as a person.
The concept of adaptability is also one of the qualities of a good employee and candidate, associated with a willingness to learn.
Their confidence will improve as well, and its benefits spread outside the workplace and into their personal life too. They might be able to make more balanced life decisions, feel more content generally, and have a clear vision of their future.
Spa staff can be proactive in their own development, which will also show you how dedicated and invested they are in your business.
3. Communication
Being skilled in communication doesn’t mean you have to be great with words or even really sophisticated and eloquent (although this helps).
You need to be able to clearly get your message across, in verbal or written speech, and be able to grasp other people’s meaning (particularly through asking the right questions). Having issues with this can drastically impact job performance.
Effective communication in the spa is a two-way street. Establishing context as the sender, and choosing the proper medium or channel, can be critical for the recipient (client).
Effective communication should always have a context that forms the setting and necessity for the statement, idea, or question being shared. Setting includes any external circumstances like urgency, opinions, or culture.
4. Drive And Desire
These traits are sometimes used by companies as a euphemism for “I won’t ask for a higher salary and will work long hours without complaining”.
But that’s not what this skill is about (needless to say, you should always pay people a living wage and avoid overworking them).
Self-motivation is key to drive and desire. It is all about liking what you do enough to want to do a good job, regardless of the external reward.
Drive and desire can also be called “passion” though this term might be a bit over the top, it is your self-motivation and determination that shines through when you meet someone and judge their potential work ethic.
Being self-motivated at work means looking beyond the bare minimum of what’s required.
These types of workers know what their goals are, strive to find more efficient ways of getting things done, and don’t require constant handholding or reminders about what tasks need to be completed.
Without self-motivation, employees have to wait to be told what to do. They are incapable of starting something without being directed to do so. Without instruction, work will stall.
This not only wastes time that employees would have used to accomplish tasks, but also takes away time they would have channeled toward self-development.
5. Shared Vision
The exact meaning of “shared vision” changes with every organization. The emphasis should be on a mutual culture fit that both management and staff can buy into and make work together.
But it’s not as simple as being about who you want to have lunch or an after-work drink with; it’s much more about who understands and embraces the workplace and mode of work, from the open-space layout to the dress code.
The shared vision might even change among different teams. It’s a good idea to sit down with your team members and discuss what constitutes a shared vision for your team and narrow it down to specific traits or values.
Reward and recognition programs are a great way of developing a culture in the workplace. These programs are key mechanisms employers can use to motivate employees to act in accordance with the organization’s culture and values.
For example, if teamwork is a core value, bonuses should value teamwork and not be based on individual performance. Employers should also put the spotlight on those who personify the company’s values.
It may be worth dropping this in at the interview stage and seeing how the candidate responds to this topic. You will get a real feel for their perspective on team culture and if you both share the same vision.
Final Thoughts
Staff fulfillment isn’t the only way that personal development increases revenue. Part of the process requires employees to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
Doing so allows them to figure out not only how to improve on the former, but identify how to tackle the latter too. With self-enhancement in place, employees will be motivated as well as more efficient in their roles.
Focusing on their personal growth will provide them with a number of key skills. These include time management, communication, emotional intelligence, and leadership.
They will also become ‘active listeners’, responding and dealing effectively with any issues that arise in their team. Self-motivation means that people look at the end goal and are not easily distracted by temporary setbacks.
Negative scenarios and failures are an inevitable part of any work journey.
Employees who have self-motivation will be able to quickly pick themselves up because they have their goals in mind. Furthermore, these setbacks will serve as lessons that feed into their growth mindset.
